Could Republican Senator Rand Paul Win the White House?

Tough talk and fearless politics have made Senator Rand Paul a leader in the Republican Party. Could he—and his charming, secret-weapon wife, Kelley—win the White House?

On a sunny Saturday in July, Rand Paul and his wife, Kelley Ashby, are taking a long drive across Kentucky horse country. When their white SUV, bearing a “Stand with Rand” sticker on the rear windshield, pulls up to a small political rally in rural St. Catharine, the state’s junior senator climbs out with pursed lips, mussed hair, and a generally weary look on his otherwise boyish face. A bluegrass band strikes up a tune, and Paul gets into character, which is to say, he acts exactly the same as when he lumbered out of the car or, for that matter, stopped on the road for pretzels.

“Well, hello,” Paul says mildly to one attendee. “I think I’ve been to your house before.” A supporter approaches to congratulate Paul on the “fine job” he did during his blockbuster filibuster in March, when he railed against President Obama’s use of drones for nearly thirteen uninterrupted hours on the Senate floor.

“My feet hurt for days,” Paul deadpans.

Wearing dad jeans, a snail-patterned tie, and cuff links fashioned from gold coins given to him by his mother and father, the former congressman and libertarian folk hero Ron Paul, the senator accepts another compliment on his resistance to government surveillance. “I appreciate it,” says Paul in his Texas drawl. “I’m a strong supporter of the Constitution.”

The speech he’ll deliver here is replete with polished laugh lines about wasteful government spending on a “$325,000 robotic squirrel” to study animal behavior, zingers about Washington’s being run by people with “big hearts and small brains,” and red meat such as his refusal to give “one penny more for countries that are burning our flag.”

None of this is particularly new. But what has changed since Paul first shocked the political establishment by winning his Senate seat in 2010 is the air of expectancy around him—one that becomes palpable as the banjos stop, the crowd hushes, and a local official comes to the podium to introduce Paul as “our senator, considered by many to be the next president of the United States.”

The notion of President Rand Paul would once have been absurd. Three years ago, he was a Kentucky ophthalmologist mounting an outsider campaign for Senate, still very much in the shadow of his father. But the younger Paul rode a Tea Party wave to Washington, and quickly became the movement’s most intriguing and charismatic spokes­person—an ambassador for libertarian values who takes obvious relish in skewering critics, regardless of their political affiliation. While his father was content to remain a dissenting voice from the margins—or from one end of countless presidential-debate stages—Rand clearly wants to win. His stunningly swift rise in the GOP also amounts to one of the most fascinating tightrope walks in national politics. On the one side is his raucous Tea Party base. On the other is his courting of donors, establishment Republicans, and traditional Democratic constituencies.

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The longer he keeps his balance, the more viable a contender he will be for the White House in 2016. As the election gets into early, unmistakable gear, everyone is weighing Paul’s chances against a broad field of Republicans—including Florida senator Marco Rubio, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, with whom Paul has often sparred. No less an authority than his own parents suggest that he’s readying a bid. “Ron thinks it’s terribly early to be starting a campaign,” Rand’s mother, Carol, tells me over the phone from her house in Texas, referring to her husband, who is at that moment swimming laps in the couple’s pool and otherwise keeping busy in retirement with the online Ron Paul Channel and other projects. However, the prospect of a Rand Paul presidential campaign “feels real,” she adds. “Rand says he won’t declare that he’s going to run until after 2014. . . . Groundwork has to be set.”

“If he announces, he’ll be considered a first-tier candidate,” says James Carville, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager, who knows a thing or two about winning elections—and who adds that he’ll tip his hat to Paul if he can find a way to broaden his appeal without losing his Tea Party base. The senator is already catching the eye of elite operatives, including Obama’s political guru David Axelrod—currently a news analyst for NBC. “He’s not your father’s Dr. Paul,” he tells me.

In a Washington culture of men and women who live to please, Paul is famous for caring little what anyone thinks. That includes, for instance, me. During our interview at the senator’s expansive brick home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, he makes no secret of his boredom or bemusement, bouncing his knee, checking his watch, even springing up to the fridge—looking not entirely unlike a know-it-all college kid home for summer break. And yet, in the Obama era of the deliberator-in-chief, there is something compelling about Paul’s certitude. He has a magnetism well suited to the sweep of his ambition.

Paul tells me he wants to remake the GOP into an electorally viable party that looks more like America and less like an Elks Lodge meeting. That means luring Democrats and winning over skeptical minorities and young voters. He’ll do this by championing issues like privacy rights and civil liberties—such as his opposition to Guantanamo-style indefinite detainment—that he believes will form a new center of political gravity, and perhaps a winning coalition in 2016.

“I want the Republican Party to grow and to be strong and for our ideas to win in Washington,” he says. “And the way they win, I think, is adding a little bit of a libertarian infusion, a little bit of a constitutional Bill of Rights type of approach to issues and instill that into the Republican Party.”

The project has taken Paul to unexpected places for a potential Republican nominee. Earlier this year he addressed an audience of African-American students at Howard University, spoke of a more welcoming stance toward immigration at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and stood next to New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand in a Washington press conference to call for the removal of the chain of command from determining whether military sexual-assault cases should go to trial.

“I could see Rand’s sincerity and thoughtfulness in our first conversation about this crisis,” Gillibrand says. “And I knew we could work together.”

As with all political success stories, the senator has benefited from his share of serendipity, too. The CIA drone attacks, the revelation of the National Security Agency’s spying programs, the furor over the IRS’s apparently targeting Tea Party groups—all have provided openings for him to speak out on privacy, reduced government, and a less aggressive foreign policy.

“Obviously we don’t control current events, but if you happen to be in the right place at the right time . . . ,” the senator says with satisfaction. “That’s where I am.”

Born in Pittsburgh, Randal Howard Paul moved to Texas as a young boy and was raised a middle child with two brothers and two sisters in the small town of Lake Jackson. His mother recalls the way he kept slightly apart from his siblings, happy to entertain himself with a set of Lincoln Logs. “He was kind of a middle man,” Carol says. He was well behaved, she remembers, if unafraid of conflict or disagreement. “It wasn’t that he was stubborn; he would listen,” she says. “But if something didn’t work your way, he would probably tell you about it.” He showed an interest in politics early—accompanying his physician-turned-politician father to the 1976 Republican Convention at thirteen, and devouring the writings of economists who shaped the elder Paul’s thinking (along with a good dose of Ayn Rand). As an undergraduate at Baylor University he enlisted his brothers and sisters in one of his father’s congressional campaigns, drew up door-knocking maps, and studied voting returns and poll data. At every turn, it was his father he looked up to. When Paul scored high enough on his MCATs to leave Baylor early, he chose, like Ron Paul, to attend Duke University School of Medicine.

It was during his 1989 surgery internship at the Georgia Baptist Medical Center in Atlanta that he met Kelley—at a backyard oyster roast. Her date had left her at the party, which gave Paul an opening. “I kind of blew him off a little bit because I thought he was about eighteen,” she says, joining our conversation in the Pauls’ living room. The courtship survived competition from other suitors, and even a me-or-her ultimatum from Kelley, which she delivered in a surprise visit to his hospital cafeteria. Paul remembers her wearing a “cocktail dress and heels.” She describes it simply as “a really killer outfit.”

Kelley gives the famously dour senator something more than merely a pretty image-softener. The 50-year-old mother of three is an impassioned defender of her husband and his ideas. But she’ll also speak her own mind. While her husband jokes that his “gut feeling” that Hillary Clinton will not run for president is a good thing since “all the polls show her trouncing any opponents,” Kelley practically cuts him off to say that Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky should complicate his return to the White House, even as First Spouse. “I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women,” she tells me.

If Paul is an increasingly familiar presence in the news media, Kelley remains his secret asset. She collaborates on his speeches and is working with his publisher on an oral history of stories from her Irish-immigrant grandmother and other formidable women (women are a declining demographic for the GOP). She is well aware that her accompanying Paul on his recent trip to Iowa added “another element” to his wooing of the Christian right. The couple attend a Methodist church, and they recently visited Jerusalem, singing “How Great Thou Art” in the Garden of Gethsemane, a trip Paul says softened his position on cutting foreign aid to Israel. And she recently left the political consulting firm the Strategy Group for Media, where she worked on behalf of Ted Cruz, one of her husband’s chief rivals for the conservative base. Her position on the board of Helping a Hero, a charity that builds houses for wounded war veterans, helps insulate Paul from charges that his aversion to military conflict translates into a lack of interest in America’s soldiers.

But as important, she draws out her husband’s warmer, more mischievous side. Simply put, Paul is more likable when Kelley’s around—and likable still counts in politics. The couple’s repartee is fun to witness. When she talks about her love of the Swedish film My Life as a Dog, he twirls his wraparound sunglasses and asks her, “What was the one that Bruce Willis was in? The Siege?” When golf comes up, he shakes his head. “You know how they pretend to like the things you like before you’re married?” Kelley’s ebullient smile and occasional appeals for restraint balance her husband’s prickly delivery.

“He’s very optimistic and thinks anything can happen and isn’t really afraid to take risks,” she says. “And that’s great and exciting when you are in your 20s. But you realize how valuable that is with all of life’s ups and downs. Things happen; your kids get older, your parents get older; the older you get, the more challenges you are confronted with. And for me the thing that I have most loved and been grateful for in him as a husband is that he is always optimistic and doesn’t fall apart in a crisis.”

Kelley shows me family photos, pointing out one portrait from her husband’s swearing-in with Vice President Joe Biden, which she sent out as a Christmas card. “I got so much grief about that,” she says. “It was just pure laziness on my part. I have three boys who hate to pose for pictures.”

Robert, their youngest at fourteen, comes up from the basement, where Paul, 50, keeps fit swimming in his Endless Pool. The couple is trying to pass the old libertarian religion down to the next generation. Robert’s brother Duncan, seventeen, is reading George Orwell’s 1984. Their oldest, William, a 20-year-old University of Kentucky student, just finished The Fountainhead.

Paul is in quilt-patterned shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and brown fisherman sandals. (“I try,” Kelley says later when I ask her about the senator’s notorious sartorial taste.) His wife is much more composed in a pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt and madras shorts. She sinks down next to Paul on the couch, folding her legs under a tasseled pillow, and explains that, in fact, she is not sold on a Rand Paul 2016 presidential campaign. “Because in this day and age it’s mostly about character assassination,” she says. “When I think of the tens of millions of dollars in opposition research that they’d be aiming right at us and our family—that’s what it’s about.”

Paul’s rivals and enemies keep him under near-constant scrutiny. New Jersey’s Robert Menendez, a leading Democratic senator on immigration reform, rolls his eyes at me when I ask him about Paul’s conciliatory tones on immigration. “The end result is that he wasn’t supportive of any of our efforts,” he says. Other liberals have noted that as recently as 2010, Paul held firm that parts of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act improperly infringed on the liberty of private businesses—albeit bigoted ones he personally found abhorrent—to refuse service to blacks. At Howard University, Paul insisted he had “never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act.” And his endorsement of Mr. GOP Establishment himself, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, over a Tea Party challenger has prompted speculation that Paul is more motivated by political calculation than by small-government ideals.

Some of Paul’s most committed critics are within his own party. John McCain finds Paul’s isolationist foreign-policy views troubling. “I respect his view; I just disagree,” the Arizona senator tells me. I ask how the two get along, and a roguish look comes over him. “We get along fine. I called him a wacko bird and apologized.”

Paul laughs off such slights and clearly enjoys the back-and-forth of a political fight. In fact, our interview coincides with a scrap between him and Governor Christie over their opposite philosophies on national security. Paul gleefully notes to me that his latest Christie-baiting tweet is “really going to escalate the war” between the two Republicans. But his jocularity fades when I bring up a July article in the Washington Free Beacon, a newspaper with close ties to neoconservatives, reporting that a Paul aide and collaborator on the senator’s 2011 book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington, was known in the 2000s as the Southern Avenger, a radio shock-jock who wore a wrestling mask printed with a Confederate flag and joked about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

As Kelley tensely works the tassels, her husband’s back straightens and his feet come off the coffee table. The aide, who quickly resigned, is “not a racist, he’s not a white supremacist,” Paul says angrily. “The story came out from people who are opposed to my foreign policy and opposed to civil liberties” and shows “we are winning, and our arguments are winning, so this is used to punish me. And the sooner I can get beyond this, the better.”

The pursuit of power requires compromises, especially for a political scion raised in the royal court of libertarian ideals. This issue touches a nerve with Paul, who, when I ask about how his approach differs from that of his father, snaps that he’ll leave it to others to decide. “You know, I just have to go out and say what I believe in; I think I could be judged on that.”

Flashes of sentimentality seem to be anathema to Paul—but I do get a glimpse, if only a fleeting one, of the senator’s softer side. We’re on a tour of his property, which is shaded with the maple and cherry trees Paul himself has planted. At a recent event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, Paul described himself as a crunchy conservative who kayaks, composts, and has “a giant sequoia I’m trying to grow in Kentucky.”

“It’s not quite a giant,” Paul demurs when I ask to see the tree. He leads me onto the deck, where against the wall stands the sequoia, a two-foot-tall potted plant with protective wax candles and cups and wire surrounding the stem.

“The squirrels are eating the damn roots,” the senator says. “We hate squirrels. Don’t put that in the article,” he jokes. “But we hate ’em. Animal lovers will get us on that.”

Kelley, now next to him laughing, remarks that this is not her husband’s first attempt at growing a redwood in a Kentucky backyard.

“It died, and he preserved the trunk in our garage,” she says.

I follow Paul down to the garage, where a fifteen-foot-long trunk leans diagonally over a workbench cluttered with a “Ron Paul for President” lawn sign, a son’s finger painting, toolboxes, and tennis rackets. A typical suburban dad’s garage, but also a place where Paul feels free to let his guard down.

“It was a pretty good tree,” he says with something like regret as we stand in the garage. “And I couldn’t part with it, so I cut it down and brought it in here, and I’ve been thinking about chopping it up and doing something with it.” He turns off the light. “But I really don’t have any skills in making furniture.”